Archive 11

NB:
This is a set of 3 individual Giclée prints. It comes with a certificate signed by the artist and a unique edition number. The prints are produced with a small black border around the photograph. The sizes quoted are for each print. We also have included some cotton gloves to protect the print during handling.

◄ CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE IN DETAIL

The impulse for making art can often begin with a deeply personal experience and so it was with Joachim Froese's series "Archive"; a poignant and loving repurposing of his mother's treasured possessions, photographed as his response to her death.

His mother lived in Germany and while packing up her house Joachim decided to take some of her belongings back to his home in Australia. In the process of unpacking the boxes of books and of china, Joachim laid them out in his house in Brisbane in random piles, unconnected to the bookshelves and kitchen cupboards they had occupied for so long.

Removed from their familial surroundings, his mother's possessions became ambiguous, as he viewed them, thousands of miles away from the family home. Out of their familiar places, these objects appeared strangely unconnected to his life and yet they held echoes of his childhood as objects that triggered memories of both his mother and his relationship to her.

The idea of an archive of personal possessions, plays an important role in the construction of our personal histories and memories. We pass things down the family line in order to maintain a link with the past, so our lives can maintain a purchase in the collective memory. But time inevitably distorts and our memories are only ever a partial recollection and are constantly reconstructed.

For Joachim photography, like memory, is also a construction; a construction of a "truth" taken from our idea of reality. Unlike other art forms, such as painting or sculpture, where the artist's imagination conjures the image, photography needs objects and landscapes found in the real world to fill its canvas. We think what we see in a photograph is real, but the reality it captures is only the author's narrative; the story they want to tell, edited, cropped and manipulated for their own artistic purpose.

Joachim's purpose in making "Archive" was to find a way of visually commenting on our desire to archive our memories. He took his mother's books and china and arranged them into precarious towers, teetering on the brink of collapse; much like our memories which are fragile and breakable and reliant on our desire to remember and our ability to do so.

The final artworks are made up of individual photographs, three or four stacked up on each other. Together they offer an illusion of a whole photograph, sliced into parts. But the presentation is just that, an illusion as the tower of objects pictured never existed as we see it now. And so like memories, Joachim uses photography to offer an archive of the imagination, precarious moments that can only ever be an illusion of the stability and rationality we desire to find.